


Consistent Illusions

by nirejseki



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Fix-It, Gen, Hallucinations, M/M, Or not, Time Travel, creature AU, mild body horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-29
Updated: 2016-12-29
Packaged: 2018-09-13 06:51:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9111313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nirejseki/pseuds/nirejseki
Summary: When he first saw the man, tall, with bright eyes and salt-and-pepper hair cut close, he thought he was going crazy.It was a reasonable assumption, given thatno one else could see him.(in which Mick meets a Chimera, and nothing is as it seems)





	

**Author's Note:**

> For Oneiriad's Coldwave Creature AU Extravaganza, square "Chimera" (also for kickingshoes!)

When he first saw the man, tall, with bright eyes and salt-and-pepper hair cut close, he thought he was going crazy.

It was a reasonable assumption, given that _no one else could see him_.

"Who are you?" Mickey asks.

"That's an excellent question," the man replied, lounging on the counter. "But being as your mother was chopping tomatoes through my leg not five minutes ago, I think the better question is 'what'."

"What are you, then?" Mickey asks patiently. He might only be five, but he was well aware that he was neither intelligent like his elder brother Alex, nor cunning like his eldest brother Joey, nor female, like his two younger sisters, the twins, and lacking all of these excellent traits he was surely doomed, but at any rate he was certainly rather slow and sometimes he had to ask things several times before he could understand them. 

"I'm a chimera," the man says. His eyes are bright, sickly blue, like a television set that's gotten stuck. 

Mickey brightens. "Really?" he asks. He's secretly read D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths. He'd liked the pictures, and he'd sounded out the words, but he couldn't tell anybody because that book was in Alex's room and Alex'd beat him up if he ever found out Mickey went in there. He'd liked chimeras: head of a lion, goat, and snake, and fire-breathing to boot. "Can you breathe fire?"

"Sometimes," the man says wryly. "Mostly when I'm mad."

"Could you -"

"You wouldn't like me when I'm angry."

Mickey thought that might be a quote, given how the man smiles after he says it, but he's not sure.

"What's your name?" he asks. "Or don't chimeras have one?"

"I don't know," the man says. "I haven't been a chimera all that long."

"My name's Mickey," Mickey tells him.

"Really?" the man asks.

Mickey waits for him to ask if it's like the mouse, which Joey does _every time_ and it's not funny anymore, but everyone he meets for the first time does it.

"I don't know," the man says. "I think you look more like a Mick than a Mickey to me."

He didn't make the joke! 

Mickey loves him already.

Also, Mick _totally_ sounds better than Mickey.

\------------------------------------------------------------------------

"- and then I punched him," Mick tells the Chimera. 

"Of course you did," the Chimera replies, sighing exaggeratedly. 

"Because I'm easily distracted and prone to violence?" Mick asks interestedly. He'd heard one of the teachers say that about him.

The Chimera scowls. "No," he drawls, lengthening the word to several times its original size. "Because he deserved to be punched, saying a thing like that."

"That's what I thought," Mick says, pleased. No one else had agreed with him. Or believed him that Pete had been saying it. But the Chimera always believed him.

Even when Mick lied and the Chimera knew he was lying.

Lying didn't feel so good when you did it to someone that believed you, so Mick's mostly quit it. 

"The teacher told me that a chimera also means imaginary," Mick says instead. He'd been chewing on that all day. "Fantastical."

"I am fantastic; can’t deny it," the Chimera says. "It also means a vain and incongruous thought, and I'm definitely that."

Mick snickers. The Chimera was definitely vain as a peacock - he couldn't see himself in mirrors, so he had to ask Mick to describe him, and there'd been a whole week after the time Mick's daddy spanked him so hard that he couldn't sit properly that the Chimera had become convinced that his hair was growing longer and had been hilariously panicked about it. 

"Incongruous?" he asks.

"Incongruous - not in harmony or keeping with its surroundings," the Chimera says.

Mick nods happily. The Chimera was really good at defining words Mick didn't quite know, and he wasn't mean about Mick not knowing them or anything.

Besides, his favorite teacher - the one that liked him - had only started paying attention to him once he'd told her that her scarf was splendiferous, and that was a Chimera word.

"But are you?" Mick asks.

"Am I what? Incongruous? Most definitely."

"A figment of my imagination." Mick didn't really think so, given that the Chimera knew a lot more words than he did, but you never know.

The Chimera actually considers his answer. "I'm not sure," he says. "I don't think I am, but I don’t think I should tell you more than that. Just know that you're very important to me, even beyond the fact I like you."

Mick nods, accepting it. The Chimera told Mick often that he liked him; it made a happy feeling in Mick's stomach every time. It made Mick feel a lot better about the fact that nobody else seemed to like him much. 

No one he knew, anyway; just last week, some stranger had tried to give him candy and it was only the Chimera's advice that had stopped Mick from taking it. He's still annoyed about that.

"You won't go away, will you?" Mick abruptly asks before he can think better of it.

Only after he's said it does it occur to him that the answer might be "yes, I will".

"As long as I can stay, I will," the Chimera says fiercely. 

Mick smiles, a great big old gap-toothed grin.

"Good," he says. "Good."

\------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Chimera had nightmares, sometimes.

Mick did too, but not like the Chimera. Now, most of the time the Chimera disappeared for the night, or at least Mick assumed he did, but sometimes he stuck around, curling around the foot of the bed, and sometimes he fell asleep on the couch.

Mick knew they were nightmares, because the Chimera gets really upset and says strange things. 

Strange things like partner, and vanishing point, and oculus, and it never makes any sense whatever order he puts it in.

Mick wishes he could shake the Chimera awake, but he can't touch him. 

He wishes he could.

He's found that yelling incongruous - one of his favorite words now - words at the Chimera seems to work pretty well. The Chimera says that it makes him dream of whatever it is Mick's saying, and it never fits in right, and that's how he knows to wake up.

Mick makes a point of choosing funny words.

"Seahorse," he whispers right into the Chimera's face. "Seeeeahorse. Seahorse."

The Chimera's nose wrinkles. 

"Seahorse."

The Chimera blinks awake.

"What happened that time?"

"The hooded men just became hooded seahorses," the Chimera says. "It doesn't have quite the same effect."

Mick nods. He's happy he helped.

"Why couldn't I go on the school trip?" he asks. He had been looking forward to it - they were going to a factory, and he just bet that there'd be sparks - but the Chimera had told him not to. 

"Heavy machinery malfunctions," the Chimera says nonsensically.

Mick rolls his eyes. "Go back to sleep," he says. "You're making no sense."

\------------------------------------------------------------------------

"I hate the cold," Mick tells the Chimera, teeth chattering. "I know you like it, but I hate it."

"It's not as bad as all that," the Chimera says. "Do you want another blanket?"

"I'm _fine_ ," Mick says grouchily. It'd been a pretty panicky couple of seconds there, under the ice when he'd gotten to the surface and he couldn't break through, but the Chimera had shown him the way back through the hole in the pond. He's glad the Chimera made him take swimming lessons when his school offered them. "Besides, it's not like you can hand me one."

The Chimera pouts exaggeratedly. "Does my presence not warm your heart enough?"

Mick rolls his eyes.

"You're such a drama queen," he informs him.

"Moi? No, c'est impossible!"

"Ferme ta gueule. C'est possible, certainement," Mick replies. "Also, I don't like French. Can we go back to Spanish?"

"You're already learning Spanish from the migrant farmers," the Chimera says. "French I can still help you with."

"But why do I care?"

"Why _not_ learn it?"

"Fine," Mick says, secretly not minding all that much. The lessons meant the Chimera had to come by more often. "But the next language we work on had better be awesome."

\------------------------------------------------------------------------

" _You_ want to learn automobile repair," his dad says doubtfully.

"Yes, sir," Mick says.

He wants no such thing - the less time spent with his dad, the better, in his mind - but the Chimera insisted and Mick likes the Chimera, so sometimes he does what the Chimera wants even though it seems dumb to him.

"Why?"

"I saw someone playing with the car the other day," Mick says, just like he was told too. "I wanna play with the car too."

His dad snorts. "Well, it ain't farming," he says. "But hell, it's a career, and you don't need to be smart to do it, because you're definitely not smart, Mickey boy."

Mick nods. 

"All right," his dad decides. "I'll show you the ropes."

Mick sighs inaudibly. He'd been hoping his dad would refuse, but the Chimera's cleverness knew no bounds. If he wanted Mick to learn something, he'd learn it.

Mick just wishes he could learn about it from someone _other_ than his dad.

Usually the Chimera supports Mick's attempts to avoid his dad as much as possible - the Chimera hates it when Mick gets walloped, but most especially when it's Mick's dad doing the walloping - but today he's decided differently.

Mick follows his dad out.

"Okay," his dad says, popping open the trunk. "Get up here. This here's the engine, and here's the carburetor, and - shit. _Shit_. Mick, you come in here to look at the car without me?"

"No," Mick says, puzzled. His dad seems upset. "I asked you first 'cause it's not mine, just like I'm supposed to."

"You said you saw someone playing with the car," his dad says. "Who? And which car? Was it this car?"

"Uh, yeah," Mick says, because why not. This was the only car he saw on a regular basis, it being summer break and all; Mick can't imagine what other car he might've seen.

"Shit," his dad says again. "Who was it you saw, playing with the car? Was it one of the migrants?"

Mick frowns.

"What color was his skin? Brown? Black?"

"White," Mick says, making it up. The Chimera had helped him sneak a movie down in the basement when everyone was busy; it'd been a gangster movie. "He had a hat on, like a circular one."

"A circular one. Was he wearing nice clothing?"

"Yeah, a suit," Mick says.

"Shit," his dad says again. "This is Jimmy's fault, that rotten bastard. Shit. Shit, Tess was going to take you kids out grocery shopping later today, wasn't she?"

"Yes, sir," Mick says. "You were too tired this morning to go like you usually do."

"Well, we definitely aren't doing that," his dad says grimly, and walks out.

Mick doesn't end up learning auto repair for another few months, not till he can convince their neighbor to show him, but the Chimera seems pretty pleased regardless.

\------------------------------------------------------------------------

Someone is singing Supercalifragiliousexpialidocious and they sound worried, which is a really weird tenor for that song.

Mick cracks his eyes open.

It's the Chimera.

He's very dusty today.

"Mick, are you awake?" the Chimera demands.

Mick nods a little. He wants to go back to sleep.

"Mick, you need to wake up!"

Mick shakes his head. It's nice and hot and he's so sleepy.

"Mick, I need you to jump out a window."

Mick frowns a little, starting to wake up despite himself "The teacher said if my invisible friend starts telling me to do things I know is wrong, like hurting animals or people or anything, I should ignore them."

"Screw the teacher," the Chimera says. "Get up!"

"Don't wanna."

"The doorway's already cut off," the Chimera says. "The doorknob would burn you, and the staircase is losing structural integrity as we speak."

"Integrity?"

"Multiple meanings. In the current sense, wholeness, stability, ability to hold things up. Mick, _please_."

Mick wakes up. 

The Chimera sounds so sad. Mick hates the sound.

"It's too early," the Chimera says, almost talking to himself. "And the stairway is out..."

"Chimera?" Mick asks. "Why is it foggy in my room?"

"Don't worry about that," the Chimera says. "Jump out the window."

"Are you serious?"

"Entirely."

Mick grits his teeth and goes to the window. He's on the second floor, so if he jumps, it's going to hurt.

"Are you sure?"

" _Please_ , Mick."

"Okay," Mick says. The Chimera's never tried to hurt him before.

This might be the first time.

Mick jumps.

It's definitely the first time.

He lands in a bush, just like he'd aimed for, but it doesn't do much to help. His arm hurts - one wrist hurts real bad - and everything else feels all shook up.

"Get up," the Chimera demands, there beside him like he hadn't had to move at all. "Get _up_."

Mick gets up, and turns.

The house is on _fire_.

"Oh, wow," Mick says. He loves fire. If only his wrist didn't hurt so bad...

"Not now, Mick!" the Chimera snaps. "The parlor is still open - go there. Go _now_."

Mick goes all the way around the house.

It's really hot, and stinky, and everything is awful, but he hears crying.

"That's Nate," Mick says, alarmed. Nate was his newest baby brother, and his crying didn't sound too good - all choked up. 

"Go get him," the Chimera instructs. "This part of the house isn't too hot yet."

Mick ends up having to smash the window open with a branch, but he crawls inside and gets Nate.

He's about to go back out - the staircase is on fire, and everyone else is upstairs, so they'll have to jump out a window like Mick did; only baby Nate was downstairs, and only because he cried a lot and needed to learn not to - when it occurs to him that there's one more place to look.

"Chimera?" he asks.

"Why are you still _standing_ here?" the Chimera demands.

"Can you check the dog bed in the kitchen?" Mick asks stubbornly.

"Didn't the old dog _die_ last month?"

"He did," Mick says. "Amanda and Ellie were really upset about it, though, and sometimes they like to sneak down and sleep in his bed."

"I'll check," the Chimera says. “This isn’t – this isn’t what happens at all. But I’ll check.”

Turns out they are, so Mick goes in and gets them before leading them out the window. They're coughing something awful, and he is too.

They go out to the old oak tree across the yard and they watch the fire, waiting for their parents to come tell them what to do next.

Their parents never come.

\------------------------------------------------------------------------

Mick's a hero for just as long as it takes someone to start talking about his thing for starting fires, and then he's a villain, even though the investigators all say it was impossible for him to have been responsible in any way: the fire wasn’t started anywhere near him.

He doesn’t really care.

He's mostly just numb. 

He’s nine years old, and he’s got no parents anymore. No older siblings, either. 

The Chimera is with him the entire time, not talking, just there. It helps. Mick doesn't know what he'd do without him.

They get split up - Nate goes to Mick's dad's friend Jimmy, whose wife can't seem to stay pregnant and who's been looking for an heir, and Amanda and Ellie - adorable as always - get snatched up from the foster home right away, going all the way to Starling City by a foster family that started gushing about how adorable identical twins were. 

Mick stays at the foster home. 

He stays and stays and stays, except for when the Chimera tells him he needs to run away, and then he does.

They catch him three miles out and bring him home, and they punish him by sending him to bed without supper, but he didn't get adopted that day and Benny Larson did, and Benny Larson's face starts showing up on milk boxes six months later.

That's when Mick finally realizes that someone might be trying to kill him.

"You knew," he accuses the Chimera.

"I did," the Chimera admits.

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"It wouldn't have helped," the Chimera says. The Chimera is unafraid and unashamed; it has been giving inexplicable order for so long it doesn't even feel like that big a betrayal. Or wouldn't, if not for his parents.

"My parents could've been on the lookout," Mick argues.

"They wouldn't believe you," the Chimera says regretfully. "They never did, or I would've found a way to warn them."

Mick believes the Chimera, because it's true. No one ever believed him. He'd had to stop talking about the Chimera entirely because Joey kept beating him up for being crazy and giving the whole family a bad reputation.

“It was too early, anyway,” the Chimera adds, looking introspective. That was another Chimera word: introspective. “Two years. I wonder what that’ll do.”

“What does that mean?” 

The Chimera shakes his head. “Not yet,” he says. “I’ll tell you one day.”

Mick nods, accepting it. 

"What do I do now?" he asks instead.

"I don't know," the Chimera says. "Live, I guess."

"You'll be here?"

"For as long as I can," the Chimera promises.

\------------------------------------------------------------------------

It only gets worse after that.

The Chimera tells him about the gas leak before anyone can even smell it, but Mick puts up enough of a fuss that the head of the child’s house goes to check just to shut him up, and finds it before it chokes them in their beds.

The Chimera yells at him to run, so he crosses the street just fast enough for the speeding truck not to hit him. 

The Chimera refuses to let him into the water park ride that has closed walls: Mick follows a hunch and keeps an eye out, and with his help the park workers manage to pry open the ride before the children inside drown when the mechanism gets stuck.

The Chimera tells him about the signs for rabies, so when Mick sees the dog that’s foaming at the mouth, he runs into the nearest store and hides, even though it gets him in trouble for being home late.

The Chimera teaches him the basics of saving a person from choking, and Mick teaches the other kids in his foster home, and they end up saving him from the piece of toast that seems almost to expand when it hits the wet in his mouth, and cuts off his air. 

Mick’s just happy he’s not allergic to anything.

The other kids quickly figure out that he’s a Jonah, and so he has no friends, but it’s okay. He doesn’t think they’d particularly want to be friends with a parents-killer anyway, because that’s what everyone says about him, even though it’s not true and he knows it. He didn’t start that fire.

He thinks.

Sometimes he doubts it, because surely what everyone says can’t be wrong, but the Chimera always reminds him of the reasons it couldn't be true.

He goes through foster parents pretty quickly, too. He learns the number for a sympathetic Child Protective Services social worker by heart, thanks to the Chimera, and he uses it to report the really bad ones, like the one that locked him in the basement and didn’t give him enough food.

The Chimera helps him find the pipe bombs that one of them is making, along with the books and the scary letter, and that time he calls the police instead.

He doesn’t let the police get him alone, not once, not even when they don’t think it’s his fault. The Chimera knows too well what can happen with the police. He asks, stubbornly, for a lawyer, and even though they think it’s dumb to give one to an eleven year old, they’re not quite sure if he has the right to one, so they haul one in anyway, middle of the night from the defender’s office, and the yawning woman ends up sitting next to him the entire time.

The Chimera guides him away from a broken elevator when he’s twelve, and a poisoned syringe at thirteen, and a gang of angry men with baseball bats when he’s fourteen. 

Of course, the Chimera can’t keep him from the consequences of all his mistakes. Some of them are all on Mick.

Like starting that fight.

Or starting that fire.

Mick’s not quite sure which one’s responsible, but it’s enough, with his reputation, to send him to the child-court judge, and from there onwards to juvie. 

The bus crashes, of course, but Mick’s wearing his seatbelt and he moved seats three times, and he’s curled up in the crash position when it happens, so he’s okay. The next bus gets sent soon, and comes soon enough to pick them up.

Mick’s only fifteen years old, but he’s big and tall and the Chimera taught him how to throw a proper punch and made him practice until he was sore, so when the kids somehow hear about some rumor or another about what he’s done, and a whole gang of them come to take him out, he’s able to box them down.

The Chimera doesn’t need to guide him in everything. Sometimes the Chimera’s not there, after all, and Mick makes his own choices.

It’s his own choice to throw himself into that gang that was going to kill the new boy.

It’s his own choice to save him, and to take him to the juvie infirmary, and to volunteer to be his cellmate for the rest of their time there.

It’s his own choice to take the kid, who’s drugged to the gills and fast asleep, back to their room.

But it’s the Chimera’s soft “Mick” that wakes him up in the middle of the night.

Outside his open door, he sees them.

The hooded men of the Chimera’s nightmares have come for him.

They have wicked, long knives in their hands.

The Chimera does not tell Mick to run, because there is nowhere to run to. He does not tell Mick to fight, because he would surely lose. 

The Chimera stands between Mick and the hooded men, and he opens his mouth, and he breathes flame – blue flame – at them, and the flame is as cold as winter.

Mick stands up shakily, checking to make sure the kid hasn’t woken up – he hasn’t – and turns to face the men who have chased him his whole life long. He doesn’t know what he can do, if the Chimera fails, but he won’t let them touch Len.

Len?

The kid said his name was Leo.

Len is –

_ice cold flame shouldn’t mix with the heat_

_some heists go well, some don’t, you take the winners and the losers_

_we’re going to be supervillains_

_we’re not going to be heroes_

_“And what if the speedster got you?” Len – though it’s not Len, it’s just a dream, just a hallucination, the ravings of a sick mind getting sicker – asks, looking at him like Mick’s breaking his heart all over again. “What then?”_

_“I’ll be dead like you.”_

– Len is _dead_.

And Mick isn’t fifteen.

The Chimera – except it’s not a Chimera, it never has been, it’s Len, it’s always been Len – turns to him. “It’s the Matrix,” he shouts as the hooded men charge him and he tries to fight them off with bare hands, bare hands against long knives, and even Len won't be able to make that last long. “It’s the Matrix, Mick. You’ve got to _wake up_!”

Mick wouldn’t have understood that before this moment, even if Len had tried to explain; philosophy was never his strong point. 

But movies, he could do.

He wills himself to wake up, and Mick Rory, Heatwave, Legend, has a _lot_ of willpower when he wants to. 

He opens his eyes.

His real eyes.

He’s in a goddamn chair again.

This chair, to make a change, is in a fucking test tube, filled with bright blue light.

His arms and legs are large and strong, his shoulders broad; he has been sad and then small so long he’d almost forgotten how much he actually likes his body. Sure, he might not have the greatest brain – Len once said something grim about lead in the water around his area, which probably didn’t help – but sometimes, having a good, strong arm was worth it.

Punching out of the glass?

Definitely one of those times.

He’s in some sort of – laboratory? He’s not sure. It kind of reminds him of the Vanishing Point, honestly. Not quite the same: the walls are not as slick, the technology rougher, almost like it was an earlier incarnation.

He looks around him. There are other test-tubes, other chairs, other people, and –

A monster.

It’s in a cage, some sort of metallic contraption, tubes and electrodes and all sorts of wires attached to its hideous form.

The snout of a lion, the curled horns of a goat, the curl of a snake, skin as pale as a ghost-shark, skin knitted together wrong –

Blue-hazel eyes that Mick knows well.

“Len?” he says through numb lips, barely able to breathe. “Leonard?”

He makes his way over. 

The monster cowers away from him, turning its face away in shame.

“Len,” he says, pleading, entreating. “Is that you? Please, tell me.”

Nothing for a long moment.

Then, slowly –

It nods.

He nods.

It’s _Len_.

Mick doesn’t know what they’ve done to him, but he’ll be damned if he lets it continue.

“Wanna break out of here?” he asks.

Len looks at him, eyes sad and beaten and just a little hopeful.

“We could stretch our legs,” Mick continues, pretending that nothing is out of the ordinary. “Bust up a few of ‘em.”

Len’s lips – insofar as they can be call lips – curl up into something that, in a horrific nightmare, could be called a smirk.

Mick opens the door to his cage.

Len crawls out. 

He tries to stand upright, but it doesn’t quite work – one of his legs seems to end in a snake’s tail – but after Mick helps straighten him out, he manages something of an awkward hunch.

It doesn’t matter. 

He’s Len, and that’s all that’s important. 

Then they go and smash up the whole goddamn place.

Len’s arms are strong and he’s got teeth like a lion and his goats’ horns are wickedly sharp, and he manages to sniff out where the hooded men stowed Mick’s heat gun, which makes destroying everything much easier.

They manage to find the rest of the Legends, too, sleeping in test-tubes of their own.

No chair, though, and no blue light shining through the way it was for Mick.

They must only have had one chair, and decided to screw with them one at a time.

“Sara!” he calls, as he smashes her test tube open with a handy chair leg that Len obligingly rips apart and hands to him. “Sara! Wake up!”

“Mick?” she says groggily, then comes awake when she sees him standing over her with a club. “Wait, what…?”

“We’re prisoners,” Mick says. “Help me wake up the others. Jax and Stein, first – we might need the firepower.”

Len sniggers.

“Holy crap,” Sara says, jumping a little when she turns to look at the noise and sees him, her nose wrinkling in disgust. “What the hell is _that_?”

“Len,” Mick says flatly, and hands her the chair leg. “C’mon, you get Stein, I get Jax.”

“You named that thing after Snart?” Sara says, limping a little towards Stein’s tube. Stiff from the tube, no doubt. She wields the club well, cracking the tube on the first try. “Why on earth would you do that?”

“Because it _is_ Snart,” Mick says. He doesn’t want to talk about it, he always hated talking about this stuff. But he’s _sure_ it’s him. 

He cracks Jax’s tube and reaches in to shake him awake. “Wake up, Jefferson,” he bellows, thinking of his fourth foster-mother, the one with the stentorian voice that always reminded him of a drill sergeant. “You’re late for school!”

Sara gives him a weird look, but Jax’s eyes snap open and he’s scrambled up and ready at Mick’s side in literally seconds, well before his brain follows along and makes him realize that firstly, he’s no longer in school, and secondly, where he actually is.

“Don’t do that, man,” he tells Mick, sounding pained. “That sounded like my mom. Or worse, my _great aunt_.”

Mick smirks. “Go get Nate,” he advises, heading towards Amaya’s tube. 

“I’ve got Ray,” Sara says, helping Stein up. “Jax, join up with Stein first, okay? We don’t know what we might encounter – or who’s keeping us here.”

“Time Masters,” Mick says, because he recognized the hooded men once he got back to himself. “I’m betting they either survived the Oculus explosion by running out like we did, or were out on mission or something.”

“The latter,” a cold voice says, and they all turn, Amaya still coughing a little and wiping her eyes as she wakes up, Ray spluttering.

The hooded men are at the door, just off of their time ship, still so fresh from a time-jump that the green of the time-stream is still hissing off of the hull. 

“You should not have been able to escape,” the leader says to Mick. He reminds Mick of Declan. Mick wonders if he, too, will beg for his life before it ends underneath Mick’s boot. “And you should not have been able to interfere.”

That last part was to Len, who cowers. Just a little, an instinctive flinch, quickly suppressed; the way he used to do every time his father waved his hands around a little too fast.

Fuck it, they’re not getting Mick’s boot. That’s too kind: these assholes are going to _burn_.

“Well, we’re out now,” Mick says. “Game’s over, you lose.”

“You blasphemer,” the Time Master snarls. “You know not what havoc you have created – you destroyed the _Oculus_ , the only thing that kept the timeline safe and sacred –”

“We’ve been defending the timeline pretty well,” Sara shoots back. “Looks like the only thing that got destroyed was your _control_ of it.”

“Our order is sworn to defend time!”

“And ours is to defend humanity’s history,” Stein says. “I find the distinction makes quite a difference.”

“Get them!” the Time Master orders.

“Jefferson!” Stein exclaims, but Jax is already reaching for him, and Mick is running forward, breathtakingly furious that anyone, _anyone_ , made Len flinch like that when Mick should have been there to defend him –

He hits the main Time Master dead on, head first.

The Time Master was probably expecting a bit more finesse from Kronos, at least, because he’s taken entirely by surprise, and Mick manages to knock aside a suspicious looking remote he’d been holding in his pocket.

Len cries out at the sight of it, a mute, wordless cry of pain, and Mick knows what it must be.

Pain-causer. An invisible leash, an invisible whip. 

He grabs for it, getting his fingers around it a mere second before the Time Master does, helped by Nate’s breakneck charge in Mick’s footsteps. 

“No!” the other man shouts. “You cannot have the Oculus!”

“The Oculus is gone,” Ray says, soaring into the air in his suit, which the Time Masters foolishly left him in. “What are you talking about?”

“Not as long as that creature exists,” the man snarls. “The heretic absorbed the energies of the Oculus; he’s suffused by them, to the point that he can be used to power the machinery necessary –”

“What did you _do_ to him?” Mick cries out, hands reaching to grab the man’s collar.

The man smirks.

_Smirks._

“Oh, nothing but a few minor genetic adjustments,” he says. “To keep him in line –”

Mick punches him in the face. And he keeps punching, too, long past the point where the man starts bargaining for clemency, past the point he starts beginning for mercy, past even the point where he falls silent and Amaya has to pull Mick away from the pulpy bloodstain left of his head.

“Mick, Mick, Mick,” she’s saying, on repeat, when the roaring in his ears finally calms enough for him to hear her. “It’s enough. He’s dead.”

Mick lets her draw him back.

Len comes forward and reaches his poor, brutalized fingers to Mick’s broken, bruised, bloody hands. He seems concerned, not for the gory state of them, but for Mick’s well-being. 

Mick pulls him into a hug, lion and goat and snake and whatever else aside. He doesn’t care, as long as it’s Len.

They take him back to Gideon.

“Is it –” Sara starts, then hesitates. “Gideon. Is it really – him? It can’t be, can it?”

“Of course it is,” Mick says, but he sees she doesn’t believe him. None of them do; none of them know his Chimera, his Len, the way he does, and more than that, they don’t trust him – his depression and his anger and his apathy have made them doubt him, even when it comes to recognizing his own partner.

Gideon runs a scan.

It takes some time to complete.

“Captain Lance,” Gideon says. 

“Yes?”

“I can confirm that this is, in fact, Leonard Snart,” Gideon says. “The genetic alterations can be reversed, though not without significant discomfort, and only over a considerable amount of time. The pain trigger implant in his brain, however, can be removed at once.”

Len shakes a little.

Not in fear; in relief. Mick knows that the Time Masters would never have told him that it was reversible; even if it was, they would have told him he was doomed to a monstrous half-form forever, a Quasimodo even Esmerelda couldn’t love.

Well, Mick’s no Esmerelda. He’d love Len no matter how much horror was wrought upon him.

“How long will it take?” Mick asks. “After it’s done – I think we’d like to go home.”

Len nods quietly. 

No one else can meet his eyes. 

They’re more than happy to see them go, four months later, after the process is complete and Len looks like himself again. Oh, they protest that they’d love to have them stay, but it’s not hard to see how half-hearted they are.

Some people can’t deal with horror. Mick’s curled up with that horror every night and let him cry out wordless nightmares, because they had to undo each of the alterations in reverse order and his voice had been the first thing the Time Masters had taken.

Len could talk now, though he didn’t that often.

Mick sometimes forgets himself and calls him Chimera instead of Len, or Leonard, or Snart, or boss, but Len smiles when he does it, so he figures it can’t be too bad.

They’re no longer bound by the machine that connects them in Mick’s dreams of his youth, but having Len in his waking days is a worthwhile trade.

They watch the Waverider fly away together, shoulder to shoulder. Mick has in his pocket a communicator if they ever need to call the Legends, but somehow he doubts he will use it so readily.

"C'mon," Mick says coaxingly to Len, who's still far, far too quiet for his liking. "Let's go home, huh?"

That wins a small smile. "Which one's home?"

"Whichever one's empty," Mick replies promptly.

Len chuckles. 

They climb in a car - first blue one they see, which makes Len smile again - and Mick drives, of course. Len's a terrible driver. 

He assumes that's still true. 

Mick takes the long way around.

Len arches his eyebrow in silent question.

"Wanna talk about it?" Mick asks casually. 

Len's eyebrows go even further up.

"You obviously didn't want to on the ship," Mick clarifies.

"You've gotten particularly perceptive in your old age," Len replies. "Nothing to talk about, that's all."

"Perceptive?" Mick asks, eyes fixed forward.

"Perceptive - able to deduce data by observing one's surroundings," Len says automatically, then glances at him. "And you knew that."

"Yeah, I did," Mick says. "Didn't know French before, though."

"I did always say you should pick it up," Len says, and amazingly enough he sounds like he feels guilty about it.

"You can't possibly feel bad for teaching me French while you were _saving my life_ ," Mick says, not without some disbelief.

"The Oculus changed things," Len says solemnly. "Changed - me." He rubs his nose right where the snout had been. "Even before they did, I mean."

"I don't care," Mick says.

"You might," Len says, then unhelpfully refuses to clarify for the rest of the way home.

Speaking French is exactly as useless as Mick always suspected it would be. Spanish is far more useful. 

It is kind of nice to read the Three Musketeers in the original language, though. His dream-machine-given French feels old and used, for all the he only picked it up however recently. 

One day, there's a knock on the door.

Expecting Lisa - Len's sleeping, which he does a lot nowadays, like there's still a bit of lazy lion in him - Mick goes to open it.

It's not Lisa. 

The woman is tall, with dark hair and serious eyes and broad shoulders. Her clothing is not as poor as he would expect from this neighborhood, so she's not a squatter or a prostitute.

"I don't have much right now," Mick tells her apologetically. "But I'll grab what I can. What charity are you with?"

The woman’s eyes widen incrementally. “Oh,” she says. “I’m, uh – I’m not with a charity.”

Mick frowns at her. “Then what can I do for you?” he asks. He’s, like 95% sure that the presidential pardon he snagged for the whole alien thing gave him a clean slate. 

“I saw – on the news – the aliens…”

“And?” Mick prompts her when she doesn’t continue. Even by regular time, that was a while back.

“My name’s Amanda,” she says in a rush.

“Okay,” he says blankly. “That’s nice. I’m Mick.”

“Yes, I know,” she says. “That’s why I’m here. To see you.”

“Why?” Mick says, and now he’s really confused. “I can guarantee I’m not the father, if that’s what you’re –”

“No! No. I mean, I’m married.” She shakes her head. “This is harder than I thought.”

“Try just spitting it out,” he suggests.

“I’m your sister,” she says all in a rush.

Mick’s back stiffens. “I don’t have any sisters,” he says, his mind immediately cast back to that horrible night, with the fire, where he’d been standing, dumb and gaping, staring at the burning wreck of his house until the police found him and sent him to the station alone –

But no.

There’s another set of memories there, from the dream-machine, memories of getting Nate out, getting the girls out, waiting by the oak tree – Nate goes with their father’s friend, and Amanda and Ellie get adopted –

“Mandy?” he asks hesitantly.

“They told me you did it,” she says, and her eyes are filling up with tears. “And I believed them, for years and years and years, and I wasn’t till I saw the aliens thing – and the president said you were a hero – and I got so _angry_ , so I went to look up the old reports about the fire, and every single damn one of them said you couldn’t have been responsible, not even by accident, and I’ve been blaming you for years for _no reason_ , just because some people are stupid gossips that have nothing better to do with their lives, and –”

“It’s okay,” he says helplessly, because she’s started to cry and he hates it when people have feelings around him.

Now she’s full on sobbing. 

She never reached this age. But she would have, if he had saved her. But that had been in the dream-machine, surely -

_"He's suffused with the Oculus, enough to power the machine -"_

_"The Oculus changed things. Changed - me."_

Oh.

"Um," he says. "I'm - sorry?"

"No, it's my fault," she says, wiping her eyes. "Damnit, I hate feelings."

Mick feels an overwhelming rush of relief. 

"Oh, good," he says. "So we are related after all."

She laughs. 

He invites her to a nearby coffee shop.

Turns out she's involved in some sort of business thing, which from her description is more bloodthirsty than he would have thought - the way her eyes glow when she lovingly describes eviscerating an opponent company into barely recognizable bits is not unlike looking in a mirror - and she managed to track him down through a mixture of record research and outright bribery of one of his neighbors.

Ellie became a lawyer. Possibly a hit man. Mandy's not entirely sure.

Mick suggests, quite seriously, that there's not much difference. 

Mandy nods.

Nate ended up in insurance for some time, which bewilders both of them, but Mandy mentions that she's heard he became a thief after a while, which - quite honestly - sounds more like them. 

"Does our family ever do anything legal?" Mick wonders aloud. It's his sixth shot of whiskey.

"I'm pretty sure Dad's farm was partially financed by the mob," Mandy confides. It's her fifth; she drinks nearly as well as he does. 

By which he means they're well on their way to being shit-faced.

"I think I was hunted down by time traveling assassins," Mick says, after a few more. "And that my partner saved my life." He pauses. "Also taught me French."

"French is pretty useful," Mandy replies, nodding sagely. 

"It is _not_ ," Mick objects, injured. What is with all these Francophiles? He should introduce her to Len.

But Mandy’s distracted. "When you say partner, do you mean..?"

"Criminal partner," he tells her, then frowns. "Also partner partner. Oh, and we're married."

"Mazel tov," she says.

"How'd you know he was Jewish?"

"I didn't," she hiccups. "But my husband's Jewish, so I got used to saying it."

"He treats you well, right?" Mick asks. "I could burn 'em, if you want."

"No need, no need," Mandy says. "He's great. Ellie had a fiancé that cheated on her right before the wedding; she lit his car on fire herself."

"Good for her! What a bastard."

"I _know_ , right? Who even does that?"

"Better than finding out after, though."

"I'll drink to that."

"Me, too."

Eventually he manages to coax out her hotel name and pours her into her hotel room before returning home.

He takes the long way home in order to sober up.

Len is waiting for him. He can’t quite hide the anxiety in his twitching hands.

"It wasn't a dream-machine," Mick says levelly.

"No," Len says. "They tapped into the timeline through me, and they went in person when they saw a good moment to get rid of you. They wanted us never to meet."

“Why do I remember the original?”

“I’m not as good as the Oculus,” Len says. “My changes you can sometimes see, and we were out of time when the timeline settled.”

Mick studies him for a long moment.

“Do you think I’m angry at you?” he says finally.

“I changed your life,” Len says miserably. “I didn’t ask, I just did it.”

“I have two sisters and a brother,” Mick says. “And I speak French. If that’s all, I think I forgive you.”

Len still looked miserable.

Mick thinks about it, then adds, “You do remember that in the original timeline I still married you.”

Len’s head shoots up, eyes wide.

When Mick’s good, Mick’s good.

He goes over and wraps an arm around his sometimes idiotic partner. “Don’t worry, Chimera,” he says, smirking. “I remember both timelines, remember? Seems like it worked out the same in both.”

Len exhales, his shoulders slumping.

“…which you didn’t know, since you don’t remember the new one,” Mick says slowly, realizing. “Because for you, there’s only been one.”

“My timeline is static,” Len confirms. “Side-effect of the Oculus. I always remember what really was, no matter what everyone else does. I’d never interfered before, so I didn’t know what the effects would be – if your life would change, if your feelings would be different…”

“I can’t imagine a universe where we didn’t hook up,” Mick says honestly.

Len stares.

“…holy crap, that schmoopy shit just came out of my mouth,” Mick says, horrified. 

Len pats his arm sympathetically. “You were drinking. A lot.”

“Yes,” Mick says, seizing on the excuse gladly. “I definitely was. With time aberration family members. Which, you know, very, uh…you know…”

“Emotional?”

“That,” Mick says, nodding firmly.

“Consider it already forgotten,” Len offers.

Mick considers this. “Can you forget the next few minutes too?”

“Already wiped,” Len promises.

“Good,” Mick says. “Because I’m only going to say this once and then deny I ever did: I love you, I always will, I nearly died when I thought you were dead, and you’re _never_ allowed to do that to me ever again.”

Len opens his mouth, then closes it. He repeats the action several times.

Mick waits. Len’s about as good with emotions as he is, which is to say, he’s just happy Len hasn’t run out of the room screaming.

“…I appreciate that,” Len finally says, voice strangled. “I promise never to do that to you ever again.” 

“Good,” Mick says.

“And, uh,” Len says. “Ditto. You know.”

People who say being good at emotions is important in a relationship are totally wrong, Mick reflects. What’s important is being exactly the same level of emotionally incompetent as your partner.

He pulls Len in, resting his head on his shoulder. “As long as you don’t leave me again, Chimera,” he teases lightly, his eyes already drooping. The post-alcohol buzz always leaves him tired. “You can’t now. You promised.”

Through his closing eyes, he catches a flicker of strange light and glances at the mirrored pane of the window. 

Len’s eyes are glowing a bright, sickly blue. “Don’t worry,” he says, smiling that faint little smile he prefers to employ when Mick’s not looking. The best one, the one that says I love you without ever saying the words. “I won’t leave you. I’ll make _sure_ of it.”

There’s probably something seriously wrong with Mick’s head that he finds that comforting.

But hey, he already knew that much.

(He wonders if Len can still breathe fire.)


End file.
